Bare Bones Pulling BBEdit from Mac App Store
In my Twitter feed yesterday, a number of attendees at the Çingleton conference in Montréal were live-tweeting Rich Siegel’s presentation about why he was pulling BBEdit from the Mac App Store. Jason Snell has written a bit more about this, explaining Rich’s rationale:
“Siegel crafted his presentation as a list of reasons that weren’t the reason Bare Bones was abandoning the Mac App Store. It wasn’t Apple’s 30 percent cut, he said, because while that’s a lot of money, developers get a lot of service from Apple in return. It wasn’t the complete severing of his relationship with his customers, even though it’s frustrating that only Apple really knows who is buying the software and it doesn’t share that data. Nor were it the marketing challenges, the difficulty conforming to Apple’s submissions guidelines (including sandboxing and forcing some features in to add-on downloads), or the numerous problems involving the development tool chain—including the one time that a BBEdit update silently crashed the App Store’s submission tool.”
There was no single reason for this decision, but Rich eventually decided that “the added stress and frustration and everything else just wasn’t counterbalanced by the benefit of being in the premier storefront for Mac apps.”
I’ve heard similar stories from lots of other developers. The entire process – from submission to approval – is fraught with difficulties, with seemingly arbitrary rules that are applied at random. Add to that the difficulties of dealing with security features such as sandboxing (which means that many apps can’t offer all the same features in their Mac App Store versions as their direct-sales versions), and a recent debacle around changes to code signing, and developers are just fed up. This is especially problematic for small developers, who only have one or two people to do all the work, and end up wasting far too much time on problems that shouldn’t exist.
In the end, it’s a trade-off, and one that’s not beneficial to Mac users. If the good software – and BBEedit is one such app – can’t be sold through the Mac App Store, then what’s left gives less choice to users. Of course, you’ll still be able to buy the app directly, but the added exposure was a big help for Bare Bones, as it is for other developers.
We are, truly, at a tipping point—again—with Apple. No, we aren’t facing the “gloom and doom” that we faced in the late ’90s, but I fear the reaper that awaits nonetheless. The Apple community is, at some level, starting to wake up to the issues, finally. With articles like Kirk’s, David Sobotta’s, Jean-Louis Gasée’s, Michael Tsai’s, Jonathan Zdziarski’s, I mean…literally I could go on and on and on…
The Mac “media elite” are finally waking up to quality issues and management issues that some of us have been grumbling about for several YEARS now. None of these problems are new. And none of these problems reflect a well-thought out, well-engineered ecosystem that Apple has been PR bullhorning the whole time. Even during he Jobs era, most of –us– knew the RDF, we knew it was in place, but we sorta played along because, I think, we REALLY wanted Apple to succeed and we wanted to believe in that future that the Apple philosophy had always represented. But in doing so, we allowed Apple to grow into our worst nightmare: a huge, arrogant, distracted company that ships half-finished poorly-tested software and then ignores our communications for fixes and change. Instead, Apple smugly remains silent, and leaves us to survive Thunderdome-style in a wasteland of fanboys and trolls that has risen up powered by “the New Apple” RDF (like college kids are by Red Bull).
I personally don’t see the “New Apple” as strong and confident, contrary to their PR message of great engineering and brilliant products. Rather I see cowardice and fear. They’re in over their heads, again; they’ve made so many stratospheric egotistical statements that they themselves either believe their own bs or are tragically afraid of failure; and they’re so hopelessly ignorant of why the obvious (poor software) keeps happening to them that they’ve resorted to throwing things overboard to save the sinking ship (projects just keep getting eviscerated and stagnant, reminiscent of the car company layoffs in the ’80s which led to the Chrysler and GM that “died”). Why? It all seems to point to greed. iTunes sucks? Why? because it is no longer –supposed– to be a great music library application; it is an all-encompassing swiss army knife for getting users to spend money at Apple’s store of “ecosystem lock-in”. OS X can’t even do email sufficiently? Why? Because all the money is over here in iOS…we can’t be bothered. iOS sucks? Why? Because you’re stupid and you aren’t appreciating the abstract art our artists are doing here! (Forget about 30 years of UI/UX design lessons learned.) OS X Server? You’re doing “Apple in business” wrong, we don’t care about Apple in businesses; Tim Cook uses his iPad! Pages can’t read older Pages docs? You’re stuck in the past. Word processing is hard, you just don’t understand. No, we won’t consider OpenDocument Foundation. 2GB of RAM? We’re smarter than you and shareholders are so mean. Security? Trust us…blah blah, NSA. On and on and on and on.
It is just so disheartening.
Consumers really don’t care. Every time I see an article about the problems of the Mac App Store it’s always about what ails the developer. News flash the money is coming from the consumer. It is THEIR needs that are paramount. Most of us just don’t care for excuses and the excuses are coming from long time Mac developers primarily.
You don’t want to sandbox your app that’s fine but but I “do” like security.
I personally understand when there are technical issues that prevent some apps from functioning but that’s really few and far between. When it comes to hassle the Mac App Store means no waiting for serial numbers, no funky app update mechanisms, the ability to run on multiple computers without buying a family license, an easy way to setup up new computers because your MAS apps are archived.
They only way developers will thrive is if their product is demonstrably better than their competition available on the Mac App Store. If it’s not….”next batter up”
“Consumers really don’t care. Every time I see an article about the problems of the Mac App Store it’s always about what ails the developer. News flash the money is coming from the consumer. It is THEIR needs that are paramount.”
News flash: I’m a consumer, not a developer, and I care lots about the needs of developers.
Why? Because, as a consumer, it’s the developers who make a platform useful or not useful. As a consumer, I see my interests and the developers’ interests in almost perfect alignment. When Apple hurts developers, they hurt users like me.
As to the issue at hand, I see a noticeable slackening in the vibrancy of the OS X 3rd party application environment since the advent of the Mac App Store, and that depresses me greatly about the future of the platform.
Here’s the problem. Most of the issues mentioned here are a direct benefit to consumers. If you complain about Sandboxing then you’re complaining about a security model that prevents applications from being hijacked. What consumer is going to gleefully give you money to be “less” secure. Review times could always been shorter but how times have developers shipped product with nasty bugs? Anything to reduce the blatantly obvious bad stuff from getting installed is a plus.
I also care about developers but companies are collections of humans and that means if they can get your money and do less work they would do that. Security on my computing devices is paramount.
As for app vibrancy there has always been a sea of crap software and those gems that standout. There are lots of new developers doing good stuff. The guys/gals at Macphun, AgileBits, Serif (Affinity Designer is awesome), Tumult, Ergosign and more.
I see the old guard complaining and new hungry developers ready to each their lunch.
hmurchison,
When even dedicated Cupertino propagandist John Gruber in on the other side of the issue from you, it might be time to re-think your assumptions….
“dedicated Cupertino propagandist”. Chucky that was hilarious because it so true.
I think you paint an overly bleak picture, but I will agree that Apple has been making some missteps. The most recent was iCloud Drive. iOS 8 encourages you to upgrade to it but Yosemite is not ready so the end result is a bad user experience. I get that hitting a ship date for multiple major releases at the same time is hard, so stop trying. Ship an update for Snow Leopard through Mavericks that enables the new storage access. Stop punishing users for not upgrading quickly. (note there are millions of functional Macs that can’t upgrade beyond SnowLeopard who can’t sync devices through Apple’s services but their windows using friends can).
There are times when compatibility needs to be killed to move forward and the unification of iOS iWork and Mac iWork might have been important enough but it needs to be made very clear what is happening and why.
iTunes is a difficult fix. Having iTunes as your media database and acquisition hub is not necessarily a bad thing. But maybe having a light weight music app that attaches to that database (think contacts within mail vs contacts app). The deeper problem is that more needs to be unified into it. Video’s taken from my phone need to hold a place in my media library, as do photos. Applications and backups may need to be pulled out but I think Apple needs to enhance the media hub concept and tearing down iTunes is not necessarily the way to do it. IMHO
“The entire process – from submission to approval – is fraught with difficulties, with seemingly arbitrary rules that are applied at random.”
The one thing I’d change about this sentence would be to entirely strike the word “seemingly”. Apple has made lots of On The Record comments confirming the arbitrariness of the rules.
About six months after the initial iOS App Store appeared, I wrote that Rule #1 of the App Store was that the real rules are unwritten. This is by design, and is at the fundamental core of the App Store approach. In Apple’s eyes, it’s a feature, not a bug. OTOH, for the rest of us…